I am fueled, for the most part, by instant gratification and so the idea of getting our house in shape slowly has been one that I've had to adjust to. When we moved in almost two years ago—almost two years ago!—there was so much I wanted to change and fix and decorate that it felt like I'd never get it to a place where it felt like home.

This isn't going to be anything you haven't heard before, but I am a compulsive list maker. I know, I know; you probably are too, right? There are tons of us, I've discovered, who wrest control from an otherwise insurmountable project—whether it's planning a wedding or just getting through the day—by breaking it down into bite-size musts that we can cross off methodically once they're done. There's a reason lists have bullets, I think; so we can kill off the things that have been worrying us.

So far this year I seem to be reading at a far slower pace than I was last year, and I know this because I did that crazy thing in 2011 where I wrote down everything I read each month and then told you all about it at the end of the year.

This weekend, we were in the slightly unusual position of having two housewarming parties to attend (plus, oddly enough, a book launch and a two-year-old's birthday party. Is there something about the second weekend of April that makes everyone feel decidedly social? Parties, man. They're like buses. Wait for ages in the rain without an umbrella and then suddenly they all come at once.)

Quite honestly, I can barely stand to watch this video anymore since it took me seven bajillion hours to make it and if I never hear the opening bars to Paul Simon's Graceland again it will be far too soon, but if you don't mind the fact that you're going to get the chorus stuck in your head for the next two weeks, here's something that captures pretty accurately the trip I took with my parents and sister last week to Memphis, Tennessee.

I have made a terrible trade. Back when we started driving to work together, Sean and I came to an agreement which—now that I think about it—we came to way too easily for him not to have plotted it sneakily in advance. The agreement was this: in the mornings, I would decide what we listened to on the stereo. In the evenings, it would be his choice.

Hey, you know what we haven't done for a really long time? Laughed at terribly unflattering pictures of me for sport! I know it's not Tuesday—although, honestly, when was the last time I actually posted a Bad Decision Tuesdayon a Tuesday?—but what do you say we take a little trip down memory lane anyway? Come with me, if you will, to a time when boys were boys and girls were people who wore twee little barrettes on one side of their head for no reason, except perhaps that they thought they were Winona Ryder.

I am recapping, excruciatingly slowly, the two-week trip we took to South Africa last year. Here is part one, about our layover in Paris; here is part two, about Cape Town; here is part three, about Cape Point and the penguins of Boulders Beach; and here is part four, about wine tasting and stroking a baby cheetah in Stellenbosch. Expect me to be finished with this sometime in 2014.

I'm just getting over a weird 24-hour bug, which began in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning, when I awoke to find that someone was stabbing me repeatedly in the upper abdomen. A swift and panicked glance about my darkened bedroom revealed that nobody was, in fact, stabbing me repeatedly in the upper abdomen, and so I lay there deep-breathing for a little bit, then finally managed to fall asleep only to have the whole thing happen again an hour later, like a bad rerun of Real Housewives when you'd been hoping for a new episode.

I think this may be the most suburban thing I've ever said in my life, but here goes anyway: we're having a bit of trouble with gophers on our front lawn. I said that to a friend last week in a bar, and I swear I could see his eyes glaze over before I even got to the second syllable in "gophers." Hey, young people: whatever you think you're going to become when you're twelve or eighteen or twenty-three, chances are it's not a person who laments things like gopher holes on your front lawn.